Nathan Hale narrows the gap

Students are given more adult attention

REBEKAH DEN, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

By REBEKAH DENN, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Published 9:00 pm, Thursday, March 14, 2002

Nathan Hale High School is 60% white, a much higher percent than many of Seattle Public School's high schools, but it is trying hard to increase its minority enrollment and to increase the achievement of its minority students. Seniors Mulu Abraha, Lindsay Syker and Tsega Mulu work on a poster for a dance.
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Nathan Hale High School is 60% white, a much higher percent than...

Nathan Hale guidance counselor Jacob Ellis coordinates the school's efforts to recruit minority students to the north end school. Hale invited students from Madrona Elementary School to tour Hale and then treated them to a pizza lunch. Ellis also leads one of the school's mentorship classes for African American students, one of the programs directed at reducing discipline and disproportional discipline rates.
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Rhys Walters doesn't know whether more African American or white students get disciplined for misbehavior at Nathan Hale High School. In his four years at the school in Seattle's North End, the senior hasn't seen anyone -- of any color -- get sent to the office.

"It might be because we have good kids, it might be because the teachers go a little easier on the kids," he said. "But it's quite an amazing thing to see."

Hale, like the rest of the Seattle Public Schools, disciplines a greater proportion of its African American students than other students. But the school has so dramatically reduced disciplinary actions overall that only a few of the school's 115 African American students were punished last year, and only one was expelled or received a long-term suspension. Nineteen African American students received short-term suspensions.

This was not always the story.

Six years earlier, 150 of the 232 African American students at Hale received suspensions or expulsions.

Nationally, there are a growing number of success stories for narrowing the academic gap between students of color. But when it comes to erasing the discipline gap, Hale's approach may be as promising as it gets.

As part of its two-month investigation, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tried to identify a diverse, mainstream, urban school district that disciplines African American students at rates proportionate to other students. The newspaper's search for such a district came up empty, even though the paper enlisted the help of researchers at Harvard University and other organizations, including the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, an education research and development non-profit based in Portland.

Harvard's Office of Civil Rights, for example, found few examples of districts with even relatively small disparities when it examined data from the U.S. Office of Civil Rights. And most of those districts had few black students.

Complicating the question was the fact that many schools do not even break down their disciplinary data by race.

The question of whether anyone has solved the discipline gap is "a little ahead of the research," said Susan Sandler of the Applied Research Center in San Francisco, which studies equity issues.

If not entire school districts, there are many individual schools around the country that have come close to eliminating all suspensions and expulsions, providing the same desired result: equal discipline of students regardless of color.

Such schools are often alternative schools, unlike Seattle's Hale, which is a mainstream school. But like Hale, they focus on a "small-school" environment, providing more adult attention and individualized education than most urban schools.

The "small-school" approach has been hailed as a way to keep students -- especially those who have not succeeded in traditional schools -- engaged in schoolwork. One side benefit may be a reduction in the discipline gap.

"My experience has been that our discipline rates have significantly declined for all kids, and especially for students of color," Hale assistant principal Rick Harwood said, crediting staff members for helping students solve problems before they lead to disruptions.

"A lot of times, a student's discipline is directly related to frustration about how they're doing in school, feeling they're being treated differently or not feeling as smart or successful," Harwood said. "If we can help them work through that ... we're preventing a lot of discipline problems from happening in the first place."

Reducing class sizes is expensive, but not impossible.

In Seattle, the approach also can be seen at such alternative schools as the Seahawks Academy and Interagency Academy, which serve many students who have been disciplined at mainstream schools. Students at both academies have dramatically lower suspension and expulsion rates than they did in their previous environments -- and they praise the sense of caring they feel from staff, who not only give them extra academic help, but demonstrate a belief that they are scholars rather than troublemakers.

An incipient discipline problem at Interagency -- an African American student wearing a cap in violation of the school's dress code -- is solved when an administrator, after greeting the young man heartily and talking about the morning's field trip, lightly points his finger to his hat. The boy takes the hat off without a confrontation.

At Seahawks, which serves middle school students, it's evident that parents feel at home in the school; they freely drop in with questions or concerns, and they fill the house when there's a special school event.

The small-school philosophy is showing signs of success in both discipline and academics at Hale, where the entire staff is making an unusual effort to radically change the character of the school.

Four years ago, Hale started an "academy" system for incoming freshman to cushion the shock of entering high school. It now has extended some parts of the program to sophomores and juniors.

Hale's approach required a commitment by all the staff, a significant investment of extra paid and unpaid time, and about $350,000 per year to alter the way the school did business. The school covered the costs by searching out and obtaining grants.

For core classes, the school's 270 freshmen are divided into three academies, dropping the overall student-to-teacher ratio to about 22-to-1 and grouping teachers and students into small "schools within the school." The same 90 freshman are grouped together with the same four teachers for science, health, language arts and social studies throughout a semester.

Academy teachers meet with each other at the same time each day to integrate their assignments, discuss student progress and intervene if individual students are having problems.

During one recent collaboration period, for example, teachers who just finished a semester with one group of students gave their colleagues a rundown of what to expect in academics and personalities from the students. For example, they warned that one immigrant student might appear to be chatting during class, but she actually is translating the assignments for a seatmate who isn't fluent in English -- a potential discipline problem averted.

Academic support and communication with parents is stressed. Missing even one day's homework gets a student assigned to a lunch-time study class, and teachers or support workers are expected to call home if the student skips it.

Hale's ninth- and 10th-grade teachers also have agreed to alternate every year -- "looping" so that sophomores will have the same teachers they had known as freshmen.

On their own time, teachers run a "Critical Friends" group, a program in which they help each other through problems in the classroom. And every student has "mentorship" classes with a staff member who serves as a sort of counselor, establishing an ongoing relationship with a group of about 20 students during their four years of high school.

Already the results are startling. Hale's attendance and grades are up. Dropout rates, transfers and discipline statistics are sharply down.

In a survey last year, 84 percent of Hale's students said they felt safe at school, up from 55 percent in 1994. Just 10 percent said there was too much fighting between students, down from 39 percent in the previous survey. Overall, more students reported that they felt that the rules were fair and that adults were there to help them.

With the overall discipline numbers reduced, the school now is taking steps targeted at reducing the gap that exists between races -- for example, the school started two mentorship groups specifically for African American students.

On a recent day, students and their mentor discussed the best way to approach the history department about including more ethnic diversity in the school's history courses.

Hale hasn't solved all of its race-based concerns. Students of color still can note times when they have felt treated unfairly because of their race. And there are still cases of insensitivity, such as the episode that student Alice Bell saw in an English class, when the only two black students in the room were assigned the roles of two slaves in a class play.

But educators both outside and within the school agree that Hale is on the right track.

Like many of the city's schools, Hale's demographics have changed since the district ended race-based busing. The school is 60 percent white, up from 43 percent six years ago. But Hale, in another unusual move, is encouraging more students of color to attend the school.

In one of its outreach efforts, Hale's student diversity club visits south-end middle schools to convince graduating eighth-graders that Hale offers them benefits that are worth a bus ride to North Seattle. Club members make it clear that the school delivers more than just promises to help students of color thrive.

"We created this education program to help all students be successful, and we wanted to make sure it was available to benefit the students it was primarily designed for," Harwood said. "We also feel very strongly that it's important to have a diverse community, because that's the way the world is."